I used some new search engine to search for my own name and i came across my old mute sir website, which i thought was gone for good. way to hang in there angelfire! here's a link to see a comic that was written FIVE YEARS AGO! 

http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/megatherium/mutesir.html

it's still incredibly funny, especially to me because i included a million inside jokes. if you'd like i will explain them all to you someday. 

Fun times

Over Tuesday and Weds yolanda and i went to bellingham WA to visit our friends tim and stef. We went to an irish pub there that they frequestn and played some trivia. We didn't think that we were doing too well, but we tied for first, which netted us 8 bucks a piece in prize money! that could have been 16 bucks, but i said that one of the answers was "Jicama" though i thought that it wasn't. Yolanda knew the answer was "Jerusalem Choke" but stef didn't change it. oh well, still number one. I kept us alive in sudden death by knowing that the name of the horse in Neverending story was "Artax." 

I started reading some of the "Oz" books as an easy read over the break. I read the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and enjoyed it. Pretty different then the movie. A lot more cool creatures and a lot more heads getting cut off at the hands of the tin woodman. Also, everyone in the land of  oz is actually sort of gullible and simple. Enjoyable, nonetheless. I've been reading them on my old palm device which is an excellent e-book reader, and they are all public domain these days and our available via project gutenberg. Yolanda reminded me that I had used the DS as an ebook reader, and read a lot of the tintin books, which i thought were all right, but couldn't really get into (at least on the DS). So I looked into it and there are a couple of programs that convert .txt files to books. The DS works great as an ebook reader since you can turn it sideways and use both screens as pages. totally awesome and much more comfortable than the handspring visor, though it requires a little fuddling with the .txt files, where the visor I just have to download it and throw it on there, and is really not bad, not as bright and rechargable as the DS. I have to use windows for both devices. I use a program that runs windows in Mac OSX and it works well, but i can't run IE in it because it ALREADY has viruses that go to XXX sites. Ridiculous. 

Gods among men.

Sometimes it's ok to brag, especially on your own blog, so I will. Yolanda and I both got straight a's this term, so we rule. She had four classes and worked, so she deserves even more praise then me. 

Flash Embed test

This is a test to see if the NEW site i got to host flash files works, because omnidrive is pretty crummy.


This is an old flash movie I made in summer 2003. (it's got no loading screen so if you are going to click through it, give it a minute before you start. You'll need to click some pictures, and wave the mouse cursor over others.) I want to do more blog entries in this style, because i saw this blog a couple of years ago and fell in love with the style, (which is why i put together the above movie) and i think this next semester i will have time to put together something like it. I've been doing so much school stuff that involves math the last two month that I feel like i have not really gotten anything creative done, and that's sad. Here's some more work by the same artist.

Shanghai Diary
Life Lab #1
Life Lab#2

Merry X-mas

I saw this on Kotaku and thought it was pretty funny. 

studying hard

I took a bathroom break from studying and got my highest score yet in geometry wars for DS, 1,200,000 and something. That got me over 100 places higher in the online leader boards to...155! amazing! i went to grab a screen shot from their website but they only show the top 25. Someday you'll see the name sPaC3H0mbr3 up there. Back to studying, i guess.

I am supposed to be studying but i started looking for pictures of cheburashka to make icons out of. this one didn't make the cut.

eat your heart out EVERYBODY

Last night, my brother's friend Joey, treated us to free tickets as well as VIP passes to Tool's show at the memorial coliseum. It's been a long time since i would have considered myself a tool fan, but i still have a soft spot in my heart for earlier albums, and besides, who would pass up great tickets and VIP passes to anything? The show had a lot of laser effects and more of the same video screens that they have had the last...five times i have seen them. Joey said that there was a crew of over 40 people, and there were seven trucks to carry all of the equipment. I believe it. They had their own lighting rigging and crazy effects and projectors and all this stuff.

Joey showed us the bus they've been traveling in which was pretty posh: satelitte tv, kitchenette and 12 bunks each with a personal dvd player. Some of the busses even have a "camera channel" so if you are in your bunk, you can turn it on to see where what the camera mounted on the front of the bus sees. That way, you can see where you are if the bus stops. We went to an after-party of sorts where there was beer, and the drummer from tool was walking around, but we didn't meet any of them, which was fine because I am not so starstruck by them any longer. There was also a drunk guy who insisted that my brother was the spitting image of "dale" danny carey's (the drummer's) brother. He was funny and uncomfortable. Also, Joey gave some tickets and passes to some drum company people, but when they tried to get into the after party, he told the guard people not to let them in. That made us look extra cool. Trans Am was also enjoyable. At one point, one of the members took a bite out of a sandwich while playing the keyboard with his free hand. His bite was not sensible, and he spent the rest of the song chewing. Unbelievable!

All in all, a good time. Thanks to joey for getting us in and showing us around, thanks to ben for knowing joey!

this is a test post

to see if my drive share works:



it did.

Video Game Medley Marching Band Show

My sister sent this to me and i thought it was pretty great.

much better

today i am feeling much better. pedialyte really helps! thanks yolanda for taking care of me. thanks colby for asking how i was. 

sick!

i've thrown up five times since 7 am this morning. totally sucky. i don't know what it is. there's nothing left in me. yolanda went to the store to get me pedialyte. 

Rite-Aid vs. Sav-On

I was going through a box of photos and noticed that all of the photos that i got developed at a Sav-On in LA and the Rite-Aid down the street from me were sticking together and fading in color very quickly. At first I was really mad because i had to peel a lot of them apart and they are for the most part only about 3 years old, but then I found that a lot of them were much improved, notably this one:


and the one above.

Also, it's been vey cold here at night, down in the 30's. We've covered out bed in thick blankets and put the space heater in the office with the dog, since the space heater doesn't do us much good when the cat opens the door. Our house gets into the 40's (right now where I am sitting the thermostat says 51.) When i stuck my head out from under the covers when I woke up, I could see my breath.

what would you say to lincoln?

procrastinating

I am really good at putting off my homework. For example, i have two physics labs and 1 1/2 chapters of physics homework to do, as well as some worksheets to study from, a chemistry lab write up, and 4 formal calculus problems to complete, but instead of doing that, i decided that this afternoon i should really put the Wii back on the network. Done.
Then I decided that i should get really really good at Balloon Fight.
That didn't go so well, so I decided I should figure out what all the hype over Clu Clu Land was. I could barely figure that game out, but that wikipedia entry i linked to there would have helped.
Anyway, I decided after that to get really good at Megaman, but I sucked. So here I am putting off homework again by writing a blog entry. It's working, and I feel slightly more productive than if I was playing video games. My hands are freezing because it's about 57 degrees in this house. The dog has crawled under the blanket next to me to show how cold she is.

Jon's band, the a-sides are playing tonight at 9. I think a few of my friends and a lot of people at work are going. It should be fun.

Here's a couple of ghost drawings I did to make icons for my hard drives.


The second one to to designate my large external drive, so he's fat, but yolanda's right, he's totally ugly. I think I might go take a look at my homework.

Lee Scoresby

Here's a drawing of the aeronaut lee scoresby i did this evening instead of doing my lab write-up. Also, I watched "Pushing Daisies" which is a funny television program on TV.

Raking leaves from the Japanese maple that are all dried and pink and orange feels and sounds like raking a lot of fruity pebbles, making the chore a lot more fun. 

good find

Look what I found on the ground on the way home from work tonight! Lucky!

my calculus test this week was so difficult that nobody finished it the alloted time, so she posted the test online so we can do it over the weekend, and then make corrections (or in my case, write things in the blanks) in the first 1/2 hour on tuesday. I think though, even with the book in front of me, i am not going to do all that well. 

jon's band, the a-sides are in town next week. i think he's staying with us. we should probably figure that out. yolanda and I are also going to see "titus andronicus" on friday. it's her favorite shakespeare play. i understand that there are severed hands and a baby baked into a pie for revenge. sounds like it will also be my favorite soon, though it's hard to be my current favorite shakespeare musical, "Seven brides for seven brothers." 

i just found out that i could have put in a part about baby eating into that paper. a missed oppurtunity. baby pie even!

homework

yolanda asked me to write her paper for her so i did. 

eekcles is a jerk to all he meets. this is why he writes book about people being brutally beaten up. the theme of this paper is that people with names that are hard to pronounce can often write pretty good books as long as they keep it under 400 pages, and have greek statues on the front.


the story starts on pg. 1 (table of contents, pp1-2) and continues all the way to the end of the book. each of hte 26 letters of the alphabet are used at least once, and sometimes more than once. this is proof positive that aeschyutles is a good writer. As a greek philospher one said “the proof is in the pudding” (bill cosby, 1979.) Also, I think the "book" is actually a long poem. (aeschuyles, pp1-400), which means that no one outside of a classroom can enjoy it. 


in conclusion, this book is a rich tapestry of the interaction between characters, who depend on their previous life experiences and memories in order to make decisions in the present day that will lead them to the ultimate goal of humankind, eating enough food to stay alive, so that they can reproduce. (Biology, campbell and reece 2006). 

the reason for the season

i bought some egg nog this evening. I know it's not yet halloween but it was on sale. it must be too early in the nog crops, because it's not reached it's full flavor yet. 

for some reason the pictures i took on halloween are in black and white. still, there are some good pics. i will post them after i get them scanned after I get my lab write up done. 

more time lapse

i was digging around in the dirt after mowing the lawn the other day and found some eggs underground. teency weency liitle transparent things, so i put it them in one of my containers with the dirt i found them in, gave it a few mists of water and put them in the garage. I had over a dozen of them, so i took five of them and put them under the camera so i could time lapse them when they hatched. I thought that they were snail eggs, and some googling said i was right. plus one of them seems to have a tiny tiny tiny snail shell. I am afraid that the light that i have on them will dry them out. 

I just burned some chocolate croissants. the box said 20-25 minutes but there was some smoke in the kitchen after 10. they look like what they are supposed to, they are not burned, but i am afraid that they are not cooked in the middle. i think that maybe our oven is broken, or is just a lot hotter than the dial indicates. 

this post was a mistake but i can't find how to delete it, so i am filling it up with these words.

"our dog's getting dandruff. she needs some 'head and haunches'" - yolanda

Today I had a physics exam as well as a calculus exam. When you are able to make note cards to use on exams make sure that you write notes you can actually use, or tha the formulas you choose to put on there are accurate. In terms of the calculus test, we were able to use aa lot of notes, and they helped me a lot. In physics however i wrote down the "law of cosines" incorrectly (+ instead of -) and my answers were all crazy. I only realized my error much later on. Today was a long day. I still have a lot of homework to do, but at least I am at home. 
Beatrice can sit, stay, lay down, get down (from the couch) and pirouette. After only about 2 weeks of really trying! i am a master dog trainer. I want to teach her to do the dishes, make coffee and go to school for me. Or at least flush her own poop. 

Lucky us in the USA get to download Radiohead's latest a day early, sort of. I just got an email for my download link now at 11:45 pm, and while that's only 15 minutes before the official release date of oct. 10, those in the UK had to wait until 7:45 am. Thanks again mike for the heads up about the album announcement. 

School is going ok. I am understanding physics pretty well, which after the first day I didn't expect. Chemistry is still review so it;s all right, except all of our homework is through this HORRIBLE online program called OWL, that is very picky and inconsistent about answer entry. It makes homework impossibly long and irritating, and I can't help but feel that the teacher only uses it so he doesn't actually have to grade any homework, since it's done automatically. Calculus is hard, but getting easier as the teacher sees that we are stressing out and keeps making assignments easier. 

The new Zelda game for DS is a lot of fun. I wish i had more time to play it than on the bus to work and school. 

i just found out that oregon had a surplus in income tax this year, and is required by state constitution to give back money! i went to the state website and I stand to get back and estimated $350! hooray! 

i started school again last week. Seemed like it was going okuntil the second week hit.

Homework in CalcII are the hardest problems i've ever seen. I thought I knew what I was doing but after 2 hours I don't know where to begin. I even looked at the solutions, and I am still not sure what's going on. Well, i got one, but with a lot of help.

Physics is seemingly difficult. It's kind of all over the place. The instructor has a gold earring, over thinks simple problems and over simplifies the hard ones.

Chemistry is A-ok since i did the review class over the summer. I do have to have a lot of ions as well as all of the elements and symbols memorized by monday. that'll be all right. 

If you're thinking "Calculus, physics and chemistry at the same time, you're crazy!" you'd be right, but its only 1 quarter of this until december and then only physics and chem that matter.  Not sure if i have to take stats. If not, Calc II is the last math I ever have to take, which is a nice feeling, except that the teacher assigns the hardest problems ever. I know I am not the only one in the class that's been furrowing their brows for two days. A classmate tried to get help in the tutoring center and they just didn't know what to tell her. 

New zelda came out for DS yesterday. I wore my zelda boxers to celebrate. that 2 zelda releases i have gotten to wear them for! 

Summer Vacation, '07!

For one week of our two week summer vacation, yolanda and I travelled up to bellingham, WA and Vancouver, BC in a semi-repeat of last year's vacation. This time we did no camping. I took some pictures using yolanda's lomo lc-a, which i forgot about until i tried to nab some pictures of elk, and which I enjoy using. Here's some of my favorites from the trip.

This one's not from the vacation, but taken with the same camera.

Lots more here:

Lomo

laaaaaaaaaazy day.

it's nearly 4 and I sm still in my pajamas. I was trying to beat "shadow of the colossus" for the PS2 so that I could return it before 5 days and just hold onto the credit until there was something that I really wanted, but after the 10th or so colossus, it gets sort of boring, so i will have no problem returning it this afternoon. It's always basically the same battle. While beautiful, like Ico, I kind of just want to look around the world and not fight the battles and solve the puzzles that they want me too.



You get to climb up those guys and hack away at their vital spots. Most of the time though you are just holding R1, which is the "hang-on" button. Still, the game is pretty fun.

I found a flea on me so Beatrice got some advantage. Also, our pumpkin vines have flowers on them so I cross pollinated them with a q-tip this morning. We are hoping for at least some small pumpkins by halloween, but some in november would not be bad.

no elk pictures. the people at fred meyer one hour photo said that the roll was blank. that also means that the photo of the giraffe drinking another giraffe's pee that we thought we had is gone too. I shall never forget it, though I am sorry that I can't share it with you all. 
Yolanda got off to CA fine today. My watches came in the mail, after about 3 weeks of waiting. They were sent from Kiev in the ukraine, and i was told it would take a month. One has a picture of Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) on it, the other has a picture of Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to make it into orbit and back alive. They are both manual watches, so i have to remember to wind them. 

OSU called me back today and although the Entomological Society of America says that ISU was offering an entomology minor in 2007, as well as online classes, OSU says they are not. That is disappointing news to me as it would have been loads easier to go there then North Carolina, which is my top choice right now. I think that I will still apply to OSU for the fall 2008 semester in case something changes. I would like to stay in the pacific northwest if I could. 

here's sara lewis at her wedding this afternoon:



It was a nice wedding at a place called arrington apples. They told us not to take the apples off of the tree (since they sell them in the gift shop) but on the way out I grabbed 2 that were hanging about my car. I ate one on the way home and it was sour.

Highway 199 in Oregon and California is awesome. I think I may want to live in one of the teency weency towns that are along it. Not because they had any charm, particularly, but because it's in of the redwood nat'l forest and the hills are just covered in thick forest. The Illinois River area also seemed cool. I haven't any idea what property costs around there but if i lived in a trailer there are lots of places I could live, it seems.

i got back from eureka/arcata about 10 minutes ago. the drive to arcata took around 7 hours, the drive back took almost 9. I took a mild detour, driving 10 mph on a dirt road, because I had pulled off to see some elk. A guy looking at the info plaque told me that at fern valley there were two gigantic bucks as well as the rest of the herd. He also said that fern valley was "jurassic park-like" so I was sold.

I headed up the dirt road which was very much like driving in rally-racing style video games, but not nearly as fun since our car's shocks are struts are totally shot. It was an 8 mile drive to fern valley. At 4 miles there was a small booth where I not only had to pay money, I also realized it had taken me nearly 25 minutes to drive 4 miles. So I turned around, not wanted to spend another hour and a half on a dirt road. When I got back to the entrance, not only were there two giant bucks, one was threaening a woman on crutches and the ranger was yelling at her to back away. A lot of people got pictures of that. Since i was the next closest and she could sort of see me, I paid her the respects of not capturing her humiliation on film. I did get pictures of the elks, but they are on real film that has to be developed.

My legs are tired and it's hot here. Arcata and the wedding we nice. John and his roomates were SUPER nice and upon his arrival home, John made me very spicy chicken tacos with a glass of club soda. Homemade tortillas and everything, which I made after some direction. I'm sending them a thank you gift of trader joe's pepitas (john's favorite) and some stumptown coffee tomorrow.

A woman who has a twin sister in new mexico told me that her husband spends more time out of the year there then in oregon. She is also not allowed to go there. It seemed like her husband was having an affair with her twin sister and she was aware but she played it off like it was funny. It was awkward. She even sasid at one point "that's my story and I am sticking to it!" which was not funny and made everything more awkward. EDIT: I forgot to mention that one of the customers i was ringing me up was telling me about HER husband and HER twin sister.

Everything is set with Dan's friend John tomorrow in Arcata. I am leaving right after work and hopefully getting into CA around 9pm or a little earlier. John seems incredibly nice to let a friend of a friend stay overnight on such short notice. Out experience with the lads from new zealand was a very postive one, and was pretty similar, so hopefully this will go just as smoothly. I with that I was going to be driving through redwood national forest in the daylight, but unfortunately I think it will be dark both times. I am going to try to leave the wedding as soon as I can since i have to be back in PDX sunday night before yolanda leaves for CA. Luckily, with all that driving, I can finish the last audiobook in the His Dark Materials series, the Amber Spyglass.

Dax on the radio

My friend Dax has a radio show on mondays at 3pm from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He features antique recordings and promises music from the first half of the 20th century. Have a listen, will you? Archived shows after he gets some. 

http://lemondrop.freeradiosaic.org/

caught a bug, other updates

I decided i need to post something in my blog since i hadn't in a long  time, and now the widget works again for me so I will be more inclined to do updates. 

I caught a seed bug on the max today that had stowed away in a woman's hair. i saw it on her hair and then it flew to the window. after they got off the train, I nabbed it. 

Erica at work said she could take my midday shift so i can leave for eureka for sara's wedding the day before. I can even stay at dan and dana's house so I don't have to get a hotel. I am very happy about these things, though yolanda leaves for the bay area the instant I get back into town, which is sad. We are planning on heading up to bellingham and vancouver immediately upon her return, so that should be fun. 

during my week off of school I plan on building a small solar powered robot from the pages of Make, as well as finishing super paper mario and possibly renting shadow of the colossus for ps2 because I have wanted to play through that game for a while. From the makers of Ico. 

I would also like to photodocument my insect collection and do a little research on the insects that I have. I have to label them all quickly before I forget all of the details. I have been very lazy in that respect. 

I got an A in chem this term. I have my Calc I final tomorrow. I think unless i get 101.6% i can't get an A in the class. That's dependant on what my attendance grade is, as well as what I got on the last homework assignment. I am thinking i will get a B in the class. I have to apply for NCSU very soon. The idea of moving to another state for school makes me nervous, especially because i will be doing it 1) alone and 2) with a dog. I hope the OSU decides to offer the minor in entomology that they may be planning on doing. It would be cheaper and easier and I could stay in the Pacific NW that I am lonving a great deal. 

too hot.

its hot these days. last night we got home from the softball game and a bbq at haven's house find our living room 90 degrees at 10 pm. 

also i saw ratatouille and thought it was pretty boring. everybody else in the world seems to really really really like it. i was tired of the dozens of frantic chase scenes as well as dozens of meaningful chats with sad, downward glances and important life lessons learned. Also, it contains just many cliche movie plots, all in one movie!

(spoilers follow except that it's all so predictable that they can't honestly be called spoilers since you've most likely seen the sitcoms in which they are so often used) 


1)outsider wants to be part of in group, does so.
2)guy and girl fall in love, guy gets ego, girl leaves, but everything is made right again when he tells the truth. 
3)bad guy wants money, must stop rightful owner from getting it, does not. 
4)character hides truth from people, everbody misunderstands, but eventually accept it. 
5)antagonist is a formidable opponent with one weakness, is vanquished by that very weakness. 
6)character helps friends, friends take advantage of him, friends feel bad, friends help him out. 
7)father and son misunderstand each other, eventually understand each other. 

and probably a lot more i missed. Still it was funny and nice looking, which i guess is good. also the theatre was air conditioned. There was a line for the midnight showings of harry potter. those people are smart because they got to stay out of the 100 degree weather for only the cost of a movie ticket, all day. there were about 6 of them. 
  

it looks like the blogger dashboard widget works again. i am happy about that! 

Back from los angeles and we had a good time. the next post will be a rundown of what we did and some pictures of that kind of stuff. thanks very much to nicole and mikey for letting us stay at their houses and to everyone we saw for helping to make it such a great trip. 

today I had the day off of work and i was supposed to be spending it catching up on math, but instead I used the time to play grid wars 2. i also ate a lot. 

Harmonia axyridis

After three tries i finally got a time lapse of my ladybugs emerging from they pupated states as adults. Please enjoy. Things to look for: Wings filling with fluid, and spots appearing on the wing covers. This ladybird beetle is Harmonia axyridis, the Asian Spotted Ladybird Beetle. A native of Japan, it was introduced as pest control. The time lapse is a picture every ten seconds. You can see the date and time in the corner, so you can see how long this process took over the course of the morning, starting at about 7 am.



here's a some pictures of its life cycle, minus the reproducing because i let it go. All photos by me.







and here's a picture of the setup for the time lapse. Click on it for the stereoscopic version!

3d pictures

I saw a marquee at walgreens a few days ago that said they were selling those keychain digital cameras for on;y $10, so i got the idea to make a small 3d stereoscopic camera. I like taking stereo images but its hard with a single camera. that you are hand holding. you kind of have to get lucky that way. This way takes the guess work out of it, though since it's a $10 camera, the image quality suffers. Have a look! To view these, look at the image cross eyed and line up one of the objects in the image and then sort of relax your eyes and it should work. Sort of like a magic eye. Clicking on the pictures will take you to the picasa album, with all 5 pictures.



The first picture there of the actual camera was taken with my other camera. Again, i just got lucky that it worked out. I took a piece of wood, marked where my pupils were using a mirror, lined up the cameras' pupils and stuck them on with velcro. I'd like them to be mounted permanently, except that the USB ports would be blocked. Here's the samples i made this evening. The camera seems to work best in a lot of light.















I hope you enjoyed them. I hope to get some pretty good ones at work tomorrow, or on the train to work, or at least when there is some sunlight. I've seen some stuff on making a tripod mount so you can do it with a single camera. I might try to do that too.

summer vacation

This week has been my summer vacation, since I only have a little over a week off between terms. And it's been pretty good. On tuesday night Ben, Callen and Alex of the group Lemonade
came to stay at our house because they were playing a show in Portland. It's been a good time. they got another show this evening, at holocene, which is a better venue than berbati's pan, i think. their set last night was very enjoyable.
Also, a lot has happened the last few days with the insects i've been keeping. My moth pupa finally emerged and, as I suspected, it was Leptartica californiae.
I had suspected that's what it was after I mowed the lawn and many of them kept flying up from the grass. Also, my mystery eggs finally hatched!

this is what came out:

I am not sure what they are but they are tiny. That picture is on the side of a jar. They sort of look like tiny turtles. I am not sure what they are, so I am not sure what they eat. I found some more of the eggs on some ivy in my backyard. I think they are some kind of hemiptera, or true bug, but i really don't know. The best way to find out is just let them grow up.
My ladybug larvae finally got some aphids and at them all, and three of them went into a pupa stage. I hope to get the time lapse camera on them tomorrow. I think I have some time.
There are a lot of baby grasshoppers around. They are very small. Smaller than half a penny.

I gave this guy some lettuce and some leaves from the corn we bought and he seems to be enjoying them.

I start classes again on monday. I ordered a textbook from powells and saved about a hundred dollars, and then they emailed me and told me that it was unavailable. Lame. I found it on amazon and ordered it from a guy in WA. Right after I placed the order I found out that there are two versions of the book: Calculus and Single Variable Calculus. I really hope that I got the right one. I can't realy afford to order a text book I don't need. Luckily if I do need to order another one there are a lot of amazon that are about $70.

I think that's about all. I got an email from my mom that said that she made it to florida ok.

Also, I have to profess my love for daigasso! band brothers for the DS. like DDR for your fingers. Very good way to pass some time on the toilet.

also, i got an A in biology, which means I got an A on my final, I think, which is remarkable because i didn't feel like a knew a damn thing. 

after two days of time lapsing the ladybug larva, it finally emerged. but then upon reviewing the photos i had filled up thew alloted memory amount with pictures of it not moving at all, so it didn't snap any pictures of it actually emerging. a total disappointment. In frustration, i smashed the ladybug. I'm just kidding, but i didn't get any pictures of it. hopefully if i can find some damn aphids i can feed the other larvae i have until they decide it's time to metamorphosize too. 

schools done for the term. i get a full week off and then i start calculus and chemistry, which'll set me back about $250 in textbooks and lab manuals. 

my math and science finals were harder then I expected, and I think that I may have blown my A's in those classes. I did get an A in japanese, which was downright shocking, as I had opted to get a P in the class. She had forgotten though and gave me a letter A grade, thank goodness. 

for my week off I have to work some of those days, but i am going to the gorge on monday morning I think. hopefully i'll be able to get some stonefly, and some other insects i've never seen before by going off the path. 

OH one of my ladybug pupae hatched. I have a timelapse camera set up on the other one downstairs, which you'll see as a movie after it emerges. 

finals week

sorry for the lack of updates, if you are even reading. I had a great big final project due in bio, which i decided to make twice as big buy constructing a field guide describing the insects that I caught. if i had webspace i would upload it. Maybe i will upload it to one of those public site things. If you want it, you can email me or leave me a comment. 

Tomorrow I have my japanese "final" which is a five minute interview. I forget what time it is. i thought that i was all done with japanese but my teacher just emailed me and told me to resubmit a couple of assignments before tomorrow, and that it was urgent. i am hoping that it's because if i redo them i can get an A. that'd be great. Except that I think I may have blown my A in Math today because i didn't study very hard for my final, and I didn;t know how to do a couple of the problems. Oh well. I think I still did just fine. I didn't fail, that's for sure. I have a bio final on weds that I was supposed to be studying for tonight but I didn't so much because beatrice was being a jerk. 

I'm not really looking forward to starting calculus and chemistry in a couple of weeks, but I am looking forward to going to southern california in a couple of weeks. 

I finally got a haircut. now i just need a shave. 

If you are on facebook, look for me, i guess. or don't. I started it because i was wondering what my old roomate sabastian was up to, and according to his wife jasmine, that's the best way to get ahold of him. this blogger post won't let me upload a picture. I wonder if it's because of the new safari beta 3. It is faster than firefox, that's for sure, though. 

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fondue face: we ate fondue for early dinner.

i totally got an A on the bio test.

Today is super sunny. it's says it's 75 but i'll bet walking home will feel hotter than that. Last night was really warm. We need to get a lixit for the dog at night. she gets really hot very fast, even just in her kennel.

I took a math test this morning which went find except for the part about proving some trig. identity. I tried doing it about 4 times, even with hints that the teacher gave on which identities to use to prove it, but it was still not working out, so I left it. Judging by the way everybody else was sighing, I am sure I am not the only one that couldn't get it. I think i did jsut fine on the rest of the test, and that problem was worth 9 points, which i am sure he did so you could miss it entirely and still get an A.

I had a lot of extra time so I started watching the nova special "The elegant universe" again, after some mentions of it in the podcast "Brain Food". I also found an audio book by Brian Greene called "The Fabric of the Cosmos", but i haven't started listening to it yet.

Yolanda's mom is in town. We will probably see her this evening. I just remembered that I work at 4 am, which makes me sad. Memorial Day threw me off a lot.

Tomorrow is the last week of the spring term, then I get two weeks off. At the end of june I start chemistry and calculus, and we are heading to southern california for a few days. It will be a good trip. I haven't seen jimmy since I moved here and I am looking forward to seeing him again. I haven't seen mike in almost that long.

IN biology we are learning about ecosystems. I have not been giving it the same amount of attention that I gave the material in the rest of the quarter. We also get our anatomy/physiology unit test back today. I think I did ok.

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Beatrice sits on the back of the couch like a cat. Except that cats don't bark at anything that moves outside like she does.

Pond Life

So now that it's stopped raining for the most part this season, it's time to drain the pond in the backyard again. In case you've forgotten, we have a very large koi pond in our backyard that fills with rain water over the fall, winter and spring, and becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes, midges, and -evidently - a lot of other things in the summer.

This morning liam and I dragged the ol' sump pump out of the garage and began draining out the majority of the water. The pump we have can only get the water level down to about 2 inches deep because of it's design. I decided to try to bucket out the rest of it, but that wasn't going so smooth, so we decided to see how the sun would do this week, as it's supposed to be hot, before we went and rented a shop vac.

Whilst getting out of the pond, I noticed a sort of tampon looking thing, about an inch long floating in the water. I poked at it with a twig thinking it was some kind of worm, but it didn't move. Looking around though, I saw a couple more, and they were very alive. I pulled them out and got them into a jar. I tried to find out what they were for over an hour on the internet and came up with nothing. Behold what science has yet to discover:




notice it's mouth is leech like, but has a super long tail which is not leech like. it's also quite caterpillar like in that it has "legs" along one end. It's also COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT. I also only caught 2 of them for the jar!!! Where did this new tiny one come from? That thing they are eating is a seed thing from the tree above the pond. In the next clip you can see that the bottom ones tail extend from the bottom of the jar all the way to the water surface, probably about 2 inches or so. It's clearer towards the end of the clip.




There's also some blood worms (midge larvae) in the jar, and some other tiny black fast things that are really tiny and I don't remember catching at all. Makes me a little nervous that I was down there scooping up the water with my hands (they were gloved). I caught one to preserve so I could bring it to school on weds. and put it in a tiny little specimen jar with alcohol. It's dead now but it took over 6 hours for it to die in 70% alcohol. If you know what they are, let me know. I will know what they are in a couple of weeks after the keep growing. Then I will let you know.

Krisha came over and we bbq'd and tried out the fire pit thing we got on sale at target today. It worked pretty well, but the firewood we got from WinCo last winter still will not burn. We had an enjoyable Kindling fire though. I smell like a campfire now, which is great, and yolanda things is REALLY great. Also, the people that make the good pumpkin beer, Buffalo Bill's from Hayward, CA, make an Orange Blossom Cream Ale, and it sort of tastes like a beer and a creamsicle, but it's actually pretty good.

I got some pictures of the baby ladybugs. They are progressing slowly. The moth larva still hasn't hatched yet. I feel itchy. I uploaded some more pictures of them to my creepy crawlies album, accessible there on the right under "other pictures." There, you will find some stills of the wormy things suitable for your desktop.

I am very sleepy and I realize now that I forgot to finish some graphs for our plant growth lab paper due on weds. I guess I'll do them in the morning. I also have a lot of dishes to do and the last japanese howework of the quarter, and for me ever, which I don't need to turn in.

UPDATE: I found out this morning. Turns out that they are syrphid fly larvae. Boring!

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent525/water/aquatic/pages/20_jpg.htm

i see why lepidopterists are the way they are, sort of

I destroyed the moth i captured last night trying to mount it. My advice to you: if you are trying to mount insects using a spreading board, don't use the shitty styrofoam one that Bioquip provides. It's terrible. the styrofoam facets catch parts while you are trying to move them around, and it's not thick enough for an entire pin to sink into, so you have a bit sticking out of the bottom if you put the insect on the right height on the pin to begin with. I am going to make my own from balsa wood on monday. I really liked trying to mount it though. I don't like moths or butterflies that much but trying to mount them is challenging, and when done well, is probably very satisfying. I feel like i have been a but impatient in my mounting and have taking the specimens off of the spreading board too early.

I have to finish typing up the results of a plant lab experiment (results: miracle gro totally works, for wheat grass at least. it was a pretty boring lab) but I want to build my UV light box tonight because it's warm and I want to try to get some moths and some katydids tonight.

I subscribed to a podcast called "Brain Food" and listened to episode #20 this evening. I would highly recommend it. It uses science and math to explain answer questions about things that listeners write in about, such as why does bleach work to turn things white and what happenes if to spaceships head opposite directions at 75% the speed of light, would they be heading away from each other faster than the speed of light? the answer to that question is sort of ridiculous and made my eyes water. Time/Space is hard for me to wrap my head around.

I gotta get this light box made so I can get the results section all done and sent off to my lab partners. The beaverton farmers market was a lot of fun. We got a venus fly trap, some plum honey, a pupcake (cupcake for beatrice) some INCREDIBLE mustard made by nuns (and i hate mustard and nuns) and some other cool stuff. We plan to meet up with some coworkers there weekly now.

we gave Mijo, one of ours cats, to a coworker because he was getting to be too much to bear, fighting lucy all the time, and there was a rumor that she'd already lost him after a week. She said this morning that last night after she got home from sean's party that she'd put a sweater on him and felt guilty. It seems weird that she would make something like that up to throw us off the trail, so we are happy that he's not dead somewhere, considering he has to have a special diet in order to not get crystals blocking his urinary tract any longer.

I had a good time at sean's birthday party this evening. He lives in an old cabin in a small grouping of trees...thats been developed all around it. while you are there it feels like you are the woods, but then you leave the grove of trees and it's all new developments and a school. The historical society owns it and they are kicking them out. They also had a giant lamp, of which i will upload a picture of in the morning.

I hurt my foot yesterday, and it hurt enough this morning that I called in sick to work, but now it feels better, so I guess that I will go to work tomorrow. I went to lab this afternoon and I felt ok to walk a short distance on, so thats good. I didn't want to have to go to the doctor.

tomorrow it's the beaverton farmers market at 9:30 and then work. I think that i don't like my job anymore. Only about a year before I am fully vested in my retirement, which is good.

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How to send a text message to your desktop.

I used to carry a notebook for reminders and ideas but they always get washed, or I forget to check them, etc. My old phone used to have a note program that would post a note as the wallpaper and I loved it but I gave that phone to mike when I switched to tmobile. My current phone, a razr, doesn't have that.

Anyway, I wanted to be able to send a text message and have it as a note on my desktop the next time i checked my computer. I devised a pretty easy way to do it for free.

1) Have a cell phone with text message capabilities, preferably your own because the number has to be linked to #2

2)Have a google account, such as a gmail account.

3)Create a google calendar.

4)Link it to your mobile phone number, under settings.

5)Get a widget for Dashboard or Konfabulator
that checks your google calendar for you.

6)Send a text message to GVENT to add a new event to your Google Calendar.

7)Voila! It shows up on your desktop! if you want it to stay for a few days, set your widget to shows the events for the next week, and add a date in the near future, or just add tomorrow.

It's worked great for me the last few days and it was free! other than the cost of the text message.

HEY!

This girl I was sitting next to on the bus kept ending conversations on her phone by yelling "HEY!" instead of saying bye.

"He didn't say that...*expletive*...He stupid then...All right...HEY!"

I had my headphones on, so I thought that she was trying to get my attention, but everytime I looked over she was looking at her phone.

Also, I managed to snap a lot of good shots of spittle bugs in all sorts of stages yesterday. You can see them in my "other photos" link over there to the right. I will have some more links there to friends blogs soon. This guy below is about 2mm in length.

baby ladybugs

I took beatrice for a walk today to the small stretch of park a few blocks from our house that has a couple of rows of cherry trees. I noticed a lot of the leaves had been munched on by something so I took the oppurtunity to look for what might have been munching upon them. I was hoping to find some caterpillars or a cocoon or something. I sort of did.

I spotted this tiny bunch on the underside of a leaf on one of the cherry trees. At first I thought that it was a bunch of aphids eating eggs, until I got home and saw that it was actually a lot of things coming out of the eggs.

You can see that they are pretty tiny and that the are coming out of the white eggs. I am supposing that the yellow ones aren't hatched yet. In the next photo, you can see one of the larvae in the eggs.

I thought that they were pretty neat. I put them in a jar out of the sun and will go back later to get some more leaves for them to eat.

I also found this guy, that I am sure the other little ones will eventually turn into.

This guy is a ladybird beetle (ladybug) larva. They aren't very quick and they can't fly like their adult forms. I put him in a small prescription medicine bottle. He seems to like eating the leaves too. I think I will keep him until his final molt, so I can see what type of ladybird beetle he becomes.

I think that over the summer I will use this blog to keep up on insect studies, since I am not taking any biology courses that term, just chemistry and calculus. I want to put together a field guide to NE portland, since there's a lot of interesting bugs here. I am working on documenting some spittle bugs in our backyard, from larva to adult. One of my neighbors has them all over their lavender. I think what I thought were leafhoppers on the ivy last year were the final instars (stages) of spittle bugs.

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with bed head. now i have to get ready to go to school.

parental duties

here's one of the interesting things i learned today, from my textbook Campbell Biology:

"Compared with many other insects, giant water bugs of the genus Belostoma produce relatively few offspring, but parental protection enhances survival. Fertilization is internal, but the female then glues her fertilized eggs to the back of the male (shown here). Whereas the males of most insect species provide no parental care for their offspring, the male giant water bug carries them for days, frequently fanning water over them. This treatment helps keep the eggs moist, aerated, and free of parasites."

Also, about some Annelids:

"Among the simplest systems are those of polychaete worms (phylum Annelida). Most polychaetes have separate sexes but do not have distinct gonads; rather, the eggs and sperm develop from undifferentiated cells lining the coelom. As the gametes mature, they are released from the body wall and fill the coelom. Depending on the species, mature gametes may be shed through the excretory openings, or the swelling mass of eggs may split the body open, killing the parent and spilling the eggs into the environment."

japanese hw

i did my japanese homework in record time tonight, but it's all a charade: i am terrible at japanese.

日本語はとてもむずかしいです。わたしは詐ぎです。でも、ちよつとはねします。

Heres a test with photos. That being the fun part of this.

i think this upload from my phone costed me 1.35! this will be the last mobile blog with pictures.

Test

(this was just a test of blogger's mobile blogging capabilities. Took me forever to set up. turned out that i had smtp and smpt mixed up.) it's not important. stop reading.

starting a new blog

i had the old blog at www.livejournal.com/users/scent_memory but that's the old one and this is the new one. I think this one is just easier to deal with, as it's linked to my google account.

I thought that maybe i wouldn't tell anybody about this blog, but i don't think that's going to be the case.

since i have a camera built into my computer i think i should probably take a picture of myself with every post. that way i can eventually time lapse it all and watch myself grow. That is, if I don't let this one go away too.

I wanted to start another blog as a way to upload things that I learn or think are interesting daily. At least one f act a day, that way I can at least learn something interesting everyday, and maybe share it.

Today I had a test in biology that I studied for and studied for and i guess it paid off because i thought that it was pretty easy, though i didn't finish as fast as a lot of people. I was only iffy on a couple of the essay questions, about neural thresholds and about kidney function. I think that the worst I could have gotten was an 85%. On the last test I got an 88%, but I argued one of my answers about seed predators successfully, and ultimately got a 91%.

I got a tire fixed at les schwab today and they forgot about me, so what should have taken 15 minutes took over two hours. But i read a bit in the new yorker about barack obama. that guy seems all right. They way they described him, he seemed like kind of a jerk who doesn't like anybody. At least, I felt like he wouldn't like me If he met me, which made me wonder why he would he want to be president. Though the fact he seems like sort of an asshole and not a nice guy makes me trust him a whole lot more. I don't think anybody that wants to be president or is serious about being president should be smiling right now, or ever. I don't feel like you can really trust any info you get about anybody anywhere anyway, since even the candidates are trying to sell you on something. This is a pretty cliche blog post, so more about neat things.

I found a snail with a tiny tiny tiny shell underground. He is a snail, but the shell is the size of a pinky toe nail, like it didn't develop right. Since i've been catching and preserving insects for my BIO213 class, I thought i'd try saving a mollusc, and now I feel guilty. The reason I feel guilty is that right after I dropped him in the Alcohol, (which is everclear diluted down to 70%) he immedietely turned himself inside out. or at least a lot of his insides come out of his mouth and are still attached. I will post a picture soon, cause the camera is all the way downstairs. So here's this weird mutunt, minding his own business underground, probably has no friends, and I give him the most painful fiery burning death by drowning him in scalding alcohol and he resoponds by up-chucking his innards. He's in a baby food jar for now/forever.

I am currently downloading caddyshack on liam's recommendation. Yolanda and I started watching the first season of the Mole: UK but it's seemingly exactly the same and the Mole: Australia. Same challenges and everything. Not the same outcomes...entirely. They also said at the beginning that the contestants were told they were going to be on a fictional show...